Many professions in a wide range of sectors rely on design: fashion, entertainment, furniture, tourism, culture, and, of course, digital media.
Here are a few of the most well-known types of design:
Interior design (the layout of spaces, houses, museums, businesses, etc.)
Industrial design (furniture, appliances, etc.)
Graphic design (logos, emojis, illustration, video animations, etc.)
Presentation design (infographics, documentation, advertising, etc.)
Fashion design (ready-to-wear and haute couture but also automobile interiors, decor, etc.)
Product design (smartphones, online platforms, training programs, etc.)
Service design (consulting, client relations, customer service, etc.)
Interaction design (touchscreens, gameplay, chatbots, voice assistants, dashboards, etc.)
Experience design (exhibits, escape games, virtual or augmented reality, etc.)
Strategic design (business models, organizational changes management, branding, etc.)
You’ve also surely heard of:
UX design (user experience design).
UI design (user interface design).
These two fields are in ever-greater demand. We’ll go into more detail about them in the next chapter.
Identify Trends in Visual Design
We live in the age of images. Think about it: we’re constantly bombarded with content that we first perceive with our eyes. While this may cause sensory overload, it can nevertheless be a valuable source of inspiration!
Some trends, like vintage fashion, are even entirely predicated on this. There is a certain charm to the design of objects from the past, because:
There was more respect for materials, craftsmanship, and the time needed to manufacture items, resulting in a quality and durability that are rare today.
It brings back childhood memories, triggering nostalgia—it aims straight for the heart!
Combining the two results in a sense of authenticity. Owning a vintage object provides a feeling of being unique, of not being like everyone else. Vintage design is both fun and meaningful.
Designers are on to the “nostalgia effect”, especially in the following spheres:
Fashion: both fast fashion and higher-end brands incorporate and appropriate styling details from the 80s and 90s in their designs, updating them to be relevant to the “here and now”.
Interior design: giving a new object the same form it had in the past, using an “anti-modern” design approach that evokes a different era (and the feelings of nostalgia that come with it). Think of Marshall's Bluetooth headphones and speakers.
The vintage aesthetic has also spread to the tech industry, which, paradoxically, prides itself on being at the cutting edge of modernity.
Apple made this popular with the icons they designed for the iPhone’s native applications. They closely resembled the physical objects they substituted:
The Camera icon looked like an old camera;
The Contacts icon looked like an address book—but how long has it been since you wrote down contact information in a notebook with alphabetical dividers?
And you may remember that even just a few years ago, the iTunes interface used to display your music and movie library on an ersatz wooden bookshelf...
In the end, the skeuomorphism trend did not last long in digital interfaces. However, it was useful at a time when we still needed a transition to understanding a graphical interface in a “universal” way.
Nowadays, we are much more used to digital UIs. We no longer find these abstractions shocking: when we see a symbol with three horizontal lines at the top of an app, we know that we will be interacting with a menu, and what to expect if we click on it. So we, too, are evolving along with the trends in visual design!
Other graphic trends have come and gone, but never out of thin air. Everything is inspired by something that already exists.
Know How to Detect “Invisible” Design
Design is everywhere, and it's not always visible. What I mean by that is that it's not always perceived with the eyes, but sometimes with the ears, for example. Think of sound designers...
Sound effects are essential in a movie, as they:
establish a tone and convey the film's genre (comedy, horror, adventure, etc.).
transport and guide viewers through a narrative and allow for suspension of disbelief, adding depth to the atmosphere.
The role of sound designers is to:
understand the director’s dramatic intention.
express it by "sculpting" a sound environment that will give its full depth to the film.
They even go so far as to create special sound effects, especially in science fiction films, such as:
the sound of a lightsaber in Star Wars: this sound does not exist in real life; it had to be invented.
the T. Rex's screech in Jurassic Park: this sound no longer exists, nobody has ever heard it, so it has to be imagined.
This was Jurassic Park sound designer Gary Rydstrom's mission: designing a number of different dinosaur roars.
One of his biggest challenges was working on the T. Rex, which had to be extra terrifying. The story goes that, after working for weeks on combining the cries of ferocious wild animals like lions, tigers, and alligators to create that now-famous piercing cry, Rydstrom found the missing piece of the puzzle: the trumpeting of an elephant.
The job of sound designers is very specific, but it incorporates the same basic principles used by any designer (from industrial to interaction designers):
They listen and are attentive to the audience’s needs.
They analyze and formalize an intention, a sketch, or a goal.
They design an answer through iterative processes and/or testing.
They then provide an adequate, tailor-made solution.
The experience that you're having by taking this course can't be "seen," strictly speaking. But you can feel it, experience it, whether positively or negatively, and share it with people around you.
And while the course is made up of visual elements like text or videos, you're not taking it all in through your eyes:
The length of the chapters may affect your ability to concentrate.
The difficulty of the exercises or quizzes can impact your motivation.
The tone or the storytelling can affect your level of enthusiasm for the course.
Take a Cue From Natural Design
As you now know, we are not trying to reinvent the wheel here.
Design:
recycles what works,
involves lots of testing,
throws out what doesn't work.
When faced with a problem, we look around to see if there is something similar elsewhere, and we observe if and how this problem is solved.
This reflex is intuitive. From time immemorial, humanity has turned to nature to find solutions.
Biology, medicine, pharmacology, cosmetics, and technological sciences in general (including nanotechnology and biotechnology) are also constantly drawing inspiration from nature!
The spikes, cleats, and studs that provide shoes with better grip were inspired by the biological gripping mechanisms of animals that can walk on vertical surfaces, like flies.
Self-gripping Velcro material is inspired by burdock, a plant with seeds that are covered with hooks that cling to our clothes or animals passing by.
The neoprene material that wetsuits are made of is inspired by marine animals like dolphins and sharks, whose smooth skin allows them to glide through the water.
This is called bio-design.
Nature is fertile ground for design ideas. You wouldn't believe everything that it has inspired, either ergonomically, functionally, or both!
The dragonfly inspired the helicopter, the fibers of the palm tree-inspired textile weaving, the mosquito gave us the syringe, seashells brought us the megaphone.
If you look closely, you can even find elements of nature in cars:
The noise of the engine is akin to an animal's roar or growl: you can hear it coming.
The horn is like a cry that warns of danger.
The headlights resemble a pair of eyes, especially since they allow us to see in the darkness.
The wheels are like the four legs found in most of the animal kingdom.
If aliens arrived on our planet and saw cars driving around, they could very well draw the conclusion that they are living creatures!
Over to You!
A pen, a website, an app—everything you encounter on a daily basis is worth considering, because someone designed it!
Choose any physical or digital object in front of you.
Analyze it. Look at how it's made.
Take the time to ask yourself how the designer came up with its design in order for it to do what and why.
Try to figure out what you like and dislike about its design, how and why it could be improved.
Let’s Recap!
Design is all around us, but we don't always perceive it at first glance. We can, however, train ourselves to detect and analyze it.
Design is a broad field whose influence extends to many different fields.
Nature, i.e., what already exists around us, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Now you can see that design is absolutely everywhere. So let's take a look at what designers' challenges are by going over the stages of the design thinking method in detail.
